« Last July, Natalie Keyssar traveled to Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo set on telling a story about the region that was different from the many narratives about its refugee population or the scars from recent wars. Instead, she spent the month among the area’s youth, letting them dictate the subject matter.

“If you want to get to know a region, you look at the young people there,” said Ms. Keyssar, 31, who lives in Brooklyn. “Get to know the teenagers and early twenty-somethings, and their culture. They represent all of the factors that have gone into making their culture whatever it is.” »

« This is what I want a share through my Hair series: how we can ourselves can take something that came from a different culture and make it our own. In Hair, it’s about what Ivorian women took from the Western world and made theirs. My next project is about what the Western world took from the African continent, not in terms of resources but in terms of social codes. »

« The first day Ferhat Bouda picked up a camera, he found his calling. He also found himself in jail. In June 1998, he had borrowed a neighbor’s camera to photograph demonstrations after the assassination of Lounès Matoub, a well-known singer and advocate for the Berber people of Northern Africa. Mr. Bouda, then 22, was soon swept up by the local police and spent the next three days in jail in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria. »

« What does it mean to be a Nigerian? To frame the question more decisively – What does it mean to be a Nigerian living in America? These were the two issues photographer Ima Mfon hoped to answer with his black and white series Nigerian Identities. »

« Documenting South African youth as they experience their daily routines as well as nightlife, Nxumalo conveys a spirit that is raw and evocative of youth culture in Johannesburg. Describing this documentation as a portal of his own self discovery – “For me, it has been more of a way of finding myself, of learning about life outside of people and a life that I grew up exposed in my neighborhood, Emdeni », says (NDR : Musa) Nxumalo. »

(Uche Okpa-Iroha décrit le projet du Nlele Institute à Lagos) « We foster artistic, intellectual, and professional development of photographers. We are more interested in how photographers develop in terms of reflection and critical thinking in order to engage their spaces in more articulate forms so that they can develop their visions, have voices that can be heard, establish their positions, and be critically involved with their communities. »

This book is meant to show the ideas that we project onto Africa, and the arc of change that’s happened on our feed. Early on the feed was riddled with people saying “Oh the poor Africans,” even on really happy photos. (…) The conversations get far more detailed and interesting than that — (…) the arc has been from one of paternalism to familiarity. »

« The quality of these and other projects featured in the book highlights a weakness: With a few notable exceptions, the work from Lagos is the least accomplished, meaning the festival has yet to capture the frenetic energy of its host city. This is an honest representation of the festival’s output to date, Mr. Nwagbogu said, explaining that a main objective of the festival was to address this gap by helping African photographers to mature through collaboration with outside artists. »

« As part of his responsibilities at Oklahoma State University, Khosronejad and his team are developing a methodology for assessing photos and documentary films from an anthropological standpoint. “These visual materials bear information that cannot be found in texts,” he says. “Analysing them can help anthropologists advance their studies on Iran.” »

« My relationship with their image cannot escape the possibility that they didn’t see it, or the fact that I project my biases toward their faces, unaware of their thoughts. Yet I must surpass those limitations. The ultimate aim of considering their image is to establish kinship. In looking at them, declaring that I am their progeny, I affirm our shared struggle to repossess our identity from the violence of colonialism. »

« What we see in this image is what the photographer wants us to see. We see pure innocence. One forgets that there is a photographer of this image, because the photographer has ceased, in our time, in being its author. Who made this image? Who makes such images today? The author of this image is a reporter for the French Missionary Society. Were they aware how central their image would become to African Christianity? This is one of the most reproduced images in 20th century Uganda, and continues to serve as proof of Catholic belief. »

« Azu Nwagbogu, director of the African Artists’ Foundation, which he founded in 2007, and which organises the annual National Art Competition, shares similar enthusiasm.

“One of the things that excites me is that a lot of young people are starting to participate,” he says, adding that the younger collectors are pushing the boundaries. “They’re collecting more risky, more experimental art.” (Mr Nwagbogu’s brother, Chike, runs the Nimbus Gallery, which organised what is acknowledged as Nigeria’s first arts auction, in 1999, just as the country emerged from its longest-ever spell of military rule.) »

« South African photographer George Mahashe, a PhD Fine Art candidate at University of Cape Town, originally from Limpopo, shares the award with Ivory Coast photographer Joana Choumali. (…)

The Fourthwall Books Photobook Award, the first such award in Africa, is aimed at promoting the work of new and established photographers on the continent. It is awarded to photographers who have produced an excellent body of work suited to publication in book format.

Working closely with Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg, Choumali and Mahashe will produce their books in 2016. »

Photography Workshop in Kigali (09.02 – 12.02.2016) : Kwanda Art Foundation is now accepting applications from photographers. (The training program is open to All Rwandan Photographers based in Rwanda) ;

« After two very successful programmes in Lagos, On Independence and The Ambivalence of Promise (2010) and History/Materiality in 2012, the initiative took on an itinerant format to engage Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa. Our west African neighbours Accra, Ghana in 2013, followed by Dakar, Senegal in 2014 were our host before moving southward to Maputo, Mozambique in 2015. In 2016, the programme continues its itinerancy by moving north east to the horn of Africa. This marks the first time the programme will engage with the history and culture of Ethiopia, the only country in Africa that has not been colonised. The capital city Addis Ababa, which serves as the seat of the African Union, seems an appropriate setting to continue our deliberations for the 6th and final edition of Àsìkò in its current format. »

« Hundred years after the northern and southern Nigerian protectorates was amalgamated into a single British colony, the remarkable diversity of the country remains apparent. In 2016, Invisible Borders will aim to map this diversity through a road trip across Nigeria; hoping, as a result, to underscore the borders that are both inscribed and elusive within the country. »

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« After decades of documenting the lives of the LGBTI community, Zanele Muholi’s new show turns the lens on herself. Translated as “Hail the Dark Lioness”, the thirty self portraits presented in ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’ are both deeply personal and defiantly political. Muholi’s transformations of herself in each photograph create an uncomfortable dialogue with issues of identity, social inequality and the representation of the black body in the photographic archive as a whole. They reference people from her own life – her mother, a dead brother – as well as incidents in the broader South African post-democratic historical landscape such as Marikana. »